Regions of Memory.

A Comparative Perspective on Eastern Europe

International Conference

Warsaw, 26-28 November 2012

Research on historical identities of Eastern Europe in the 20^th century has developed from two main perspectives. One is the proliferation of historical studies, which brings to light the experiences and consequences of two world wars, political and economic dictatorships, genocide, border changes and population resettlements, as well as profound national, ethnic and religious divisions. The other, is the currently quickly developing research on present memories of those experiences. Many of the latter studies have been influenced by the theoretical and normative framework of West European scholarship and political sensitivity. During this conference, we propose to shift the perspective and to compare genealogies of memory in Eastern Europe with other regions in the world, beyond Western Europe. The aim is twofold: to determine to what extent established concepts in memory studies are suitable to properly describe the various regional and local specifics of social memory processes; and secondly, to fuel the debate on European memories by research perspectives from beyond Europe. In this respect, we propose to focus both on the commemoration and the forgetting of experiences of mass violence in the 20^th century.

Download PDF

Memories of violence have been a key field of investigation in memory studies. However, the intensity and character of mass violence in the 20^th century varied, uneven both in time and space among the regions of Europe, and other continents. Eastern Europe, as Timothy Snyder argues in his recent book Bloodlands, was particularly affected: Experiences of mass murder, forced labor, rapes, hunger, ethnic cleansing, expulsions or revenge were common in this part of the continent during the turbulent times of the first half of century. Afterwards, for the purpose of political myths and stability, memory eradication programs were introduced, under which individual memories and group memories were hushed up for years to come. The ‘Bloodlands’ concept views Eastern Europe as a historically specific ecosystem of violence. During this conference, we will attempt to compare the memory processes of this region with those of Southern Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa or Latin America, and examine whether and how mass violence contributed to regional memories and forgetting.

Vis-à-vis the lasting memory boom now emerging as a global trend, we are asking then about regionally specific memory processes and research upon them in different parts of the globe. We welcome papers that answer one or more of the following questions: What kind of memory of mass violence accounts for regional specificity? What are the genealogies of collective and individual memories and forgetting related to mass violence in various regions? How and why do these images, narratives, and practices change and evolve? How do they influence the contemporary identity of a given region? And finally, how do scholars describe and interpret them? Do their concepts, categories and approaches follow the established Western patterns of memory studies?

We invite speakers from various disciplines of humanities and social sciences, who research memories in Eastern Europe and in other parts of the world that have been affected by mass violence in the twentieth century. We prefer original research papers devoted to key issues of regional histories and identities, with sound theoretical and empirical underpinning and (if possible) transcending national boundaries or applying a comparative perspective.

Organizational information:

Languages of the conference: English, Polish (with simultaneous translation)

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biographical statement by 20 June 2012. Abstracts will be selected by the academic committee. We will notify you of acceptance of your proposals by 20 July 2012. You will be asked to submit your final conference paper by November 1^st, so we may have it translated and distributed to chairs and commentators.

Participation in the conference is free of charge. The organizers will provide accommodation and catering for the conference speakers. However, only a limited number of travel refunds for younger scholars and doctoral students will be available.

We plan publication of selected papers in a peer-reviewed journal or in a volume by an international publisher.

Please send your abstract and all inquiries to: genealogies@enrs.eu

Conference Committee:

Convenors: Prof. Jeffrey Olick (University of Virgina), Dr. Małgorzata Pakier (Warsaw School of Social Science and Humanities), Dr. Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw).

Advisory Board: Dr. Burkhard Olschowsky (European Network Remembrance and Solidarity), Prof. Gertrud Pickhan (Free University of Berlin), Prof. Jan Rydel (European Network Remembrance and Solidarity), Prof. Dariusz Stola (Collegium Civitas; Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences).

Organizers: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity; Free University of Berlin, Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw; Institute of Sociology, Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Funding: National Centre for Culture; Nordost Institut; Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland; Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Please refer to Video recording section, to watch selected sessions.

Bios (1.6 MiB)

Program (353.2 KiB)

Abstracts (335.2 KiB)

Date: 6 – 7 December 2012

Venues: University of Copenhagen & Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj

Deadline for applications: 1 st May 2012

The increasingly complex relationship between the local and the global, ‘the near’ and ‘the far away’, has emerged as one of the defining characteristics of contemporary societies. With globalization’s increased mobility of people and speed of information exchange, and the cultural encounters resulting from it, traditional essentializing and stabilizing definitions of terms such as ‘home’, ‘belonging’, ‘place’, ‘identity’ and ‘memory’ have long become problematic and more adequate understandings of these conceptions are much sought after.

This conference centers on the recognition that place and space are of fundamental importance to all questions of migration, and that cultural migrations may involve a fundamental transformation of the experience of spaces and places and their close links to the social and cultural meanings of home, belonging and memory. Through the movement of people, cities, homes, landscapes and other localities become re-configured and reinterpreted through migrants’ stories, photographs, music, artwork, films and websites. Most urban spaces, for instance, are already described as inseparably diasporic, migratory spaces. At the same time, places are palimpsests that hold many layers of memory whose significance is negotiated in contemporary cultural life.

The conference invites considerations of how artistic and cultural representations of memory, migration and migrant experiences (in literature, cinema, theatre, media, the visual arts and other areas of culture and cultural practices) provide fruitful points of departure for the development of new theoretical concepts of place and belonging, and, vice versa, how multiple approaches to the perspective of place and memory can enrich the study of cultural migration.

The conference invites papers from scholars working with art, literature, film, media, cultural representations or cultural performance and cutting across fields such as studies in culture, media and the arts, migration studies, cross-cultural studies, post-colonial studies, cultural geography, place theory, cultural anthropology, urban studies, cultural sociology and philosophy.

Applicants should send an abstract of 200-300 words clearly outlining the focus of the paper, alongside a short biography, to nmc@hum.ku.dk. Paper presentations will be scheduled to 30 minutes (including discussion).

Deadline for proposals: 1 May 2012
You will be notified of the organisers’ decision by early June 2012.

For further information on the conference and the networks, see organizers’ websites:
http://migrationandculture.ku.dk

http://memory.au.dk/

Deadline for applications: 20th April, 2012

Organizers: Program in Jewish Culture and Society and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Research Group  Pathways of Law in Ethno-Religiously Mixed Societies, funded by the German Research Foundation at Leipzig University

Research in urban history of Eastern Europe – as anywhere else in the world  – focuses on cities, namely the metropolis.  Yet until the beginning of the twentieth century, small urban communities were the principal habitat of the vast majority of people in Eastern Europe. Surprisingly little is known about  the political and social universe of small towns. Without privileging a single national history or question, the symposium  examines, on a microscopic scale, power dynamics, values, belief systems, and everyday interactions from the early modern period until the beginning of the twentieth century. From this perspective, we hope to challenge established grand narratives  of historical development and organization.  We especially welcome proposals that  zero in on the mentalities, communal  structures and  organization, and the functions and dysfunctions of small town life in a comparative framework.

Keynote lecture: Timothy Snyder of Yale University. Proposals are welcome from any discipline of the humanities and social sciences.

Themes:

• Theory of communication – media of communication
• Demography – settlement politics – spacial orders
• Legal settings: rights and responsibilities
• Corporations and religious communities
• Political consciousness and urban ideology
• Neighborly relations
• Female agency
• Public associations

Please send a short abstract (300 words) and CV to smalltownlife2012(a)gmail(.)com by April 20, 2012.
The symposium organizers will cover room and board and assist with travel expenses (up to $500 for domestic participants and $1500 for international guests).

See more: Call for Papers in PDF.

Organizers: Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University and Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), Nanyang Technological University

Deadline for applications: 16th April 2012

Memory studies has emerged as a growing field of research in recent years, attracting scholars from various countries in diverse disciplines. The introduction of the new media has augmented the zeal for memory-making practices in different societies around the world. The Internet and participatory tools of Web 2.0 has contributed to the upsurge in user-generated content.  Much of these contents are generated through narratives, stories, pictures and even videos, which also provide a remarkable possibility in fostering and facilitating the production of memories and histories. Furthermore, the Internet’s capability for information storage and sharing has afforded people platforms to impart their recollections of the past.  As such, the intersections involving new media, memory and history are attracting academic interest from scholars in Sociology, Geography, History, Communication, Cultural Studies and Information Studies, who are drawing upon various theoretical and methodological approaches in examining the juxtaposition between new media, memories and histories.

In this regard, the conference is conceptualized to gather scholars from different disciplines to deliberate and reflect on key issues, paradigms and research trajectories, as well as to identify possible collaboration opportunities for further investigation on memories and production of historical knowledge in a new media age.  Suggested themes for papers in the conference will include (but not limited to):

(1) New media, memory and popular culture
(2) Digitizing memories of wars, trauma and disaster
(3) New media and the production of historical knowledge
(4) Virtual museums and memory
(5) Digital storytelling and memory
(6) Social networking sites and their impact on memories
(7) Nation-building through memories in the digital age
(8) Digital memories and cultural heritage

Primarily, the conference will allow scholars to reflect upon the reciprocal relations of new media, memories and histories, and to probe the distinctions between new media and traditional media environments in enabling remembering and/or forgetting. Through the conference, academics will also interrogate the power dynamics and tensions of the different social actors that construct memory-texts and memory discourses via new media. It is hoped that the conference will serve as a platform in the development and formation of new approaches, methodologies and directions in the study of the interface between new media, memories and histories.

Please send an abstract of not more than 300 words to Dr Brenda Chan [brendachan@ntu.edu.sg] by 16 April 2012. Abstracts should be in Word format and should include name of author(s), institutional affiliation and email address. Notification of acceptance will be sent out on 30th April 2012. If the abstract is accepted, a full paper of 6000-8000 words will have to be submitted by 17 September 2012. The conference organizers plan to publish selected conference papers in an edited book, or in a special issue of a relevant journal.

For more information, please visit conference website.

Deadline for abstracts: 6th April, 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS
As historical studies have shown, the socialist state attempted to mobilise citizens to make new nations, as well as construct of socialist modernities, through festive culture. More than just a means “to bring cultural and social enlightenment to the people” (Petrone 2000), public holidays were opportunities “to temporarily empower the participants by drawing them into the network of Soviet existence” (Chatterjee 2002). Amid often violent transformations and rapid changes, the celebratory discourse was intended to provide relaxation, entertainment, education and ideologisation, and was expected to improve quality of life, industrial productivity, state legitimacy, and national and socialist collective identities (Binns 1979, Lane 1981). Despite these efforts, the Communist Party’s ideologues were not able to fully supervise the narratives, symbols and images perceived and selected by collective conscience from the official rhetoric they created and, subsequently, articulated by the social memory of several generations. Sometimes the entrepreneurs of festive culture pursued aims that were clearly at odds with official state intentions, but, as Yurchak (2007) has shown, even key agents of social change were not always aware of the potential effects of their actions.

This themed issue of Interstitio focuses on the complexity of official celebrations through the dimensions of time, space and agency. The aim is to reveal the multiple voices of memory, strategies of building/contesting new collective identity, emotional feelings of political fear/loyalty, nostalgic remembrances and, especially, the silent experiences that emerged in the relationship between “political leaders” and “ordinary people”, as they are reflected in the ambiguous process of building (post)socialist festive culture. The editors invite prospective authors to consider how celebrations offered space and created time for resistance, loyalty or escape; how they served as frames for hope, solidarity and remembrance; how socialist performances changed people’s views of their own pasts and identities; and how the propagandistic traits of festive culture have been revived, forgotten or marginalised since 1991.

We thus encourage the submission of papers that explore the images, symbols and meanings of public holidays through a concrete focus on the historical emergence of holidays, and the individuals who created, implemented, celebrated or ignored them. Papers should focus on the use of holidays by official governments and/or other agents, and their motivations and effects, and should be based on ethnographic fieldwork and/or historical sources. The editors are also interested in innovative approaches to the methodological complexities posed by the historical-comparative nature of this theme, and encourage authors to consider how (post)socialist festive culture compares with those found outside the region.

Suggested focus questions include, but are not limited to, the following:
• What were/are the limits of festive culture in shaping social realities?
• How did either the producers or the consumers of festive culture adapt to the limits imposed by (post)socialist cultural policies?
• How did/do ordinary people perceive the festive culture products sanctioned and promoted by the (post)socialist regimes?
• What practices of adaptation, negotiation or resistance can be discerned, and how influential were they in undermining the legitimacy of (post)socialist nation-building?
• What historical narratives and systems of memory have supported the on-going formation of (post)socialist festive culture?
• What were the (post)socialist transformations in the case of religious or traditional feasts?
• How did folklore and folklorists transform socialism and the socialist state?
• How can the revival of soviet ideological patterns in the festive culture after socialism be explained?

Important dates:
• Submission deadline for abstracts: 6 April 2012
• Submission deadline for papers: 31 May 2012
• Target publication date: 10 September 2012

How to submit:
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically as an email attachment in MS Word format at interstitio@promemoria.md.

Instructions to prospective authors:
Submissions should follow the author guidelines available on the journal’s website.

About the journal:
Interstitio. East European Review of Historical and Cultural Anthropology (ISSN: 1857-049X) is a peer-reviewed journal published by the “ProMemoria” Institute of Social History at the Moldova State University, in cooperation with the Institute of History of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Silesia. The journal provides a forum for discussion on topics of mutual interest to scholars from the field of historical and cultural anthropology, and aims to foster interdisciplinary research at the crossroads of history, culture and anthropology. Editors welcome papers (empirical research and/or theoretical reflection) concerning Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the perspective of historical and cultural anthropology.

1. The Bronisław Geremek Fellowships will enable Polish senior and junior researchers to work on a research project of their choice. They are open to all academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences; research proposals related to one of the IWM’s main fields are strongly encouraged. The Bronisław Geremek Fellows will be invited to spend the academic year 2012/13 (ten months from September 2012 to June 2013) at the IWM.

deadline for applications: 15th April, more details here.

2. The Alexander Herzen Junior Visiting Fellowships 2012-2013 are designed as an award for excellence for the most promising young researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences from the Siberian, Ural and Far-Eastern federal districts, and the Voronezh, Lipetsk, Belgorod, Ryazan and Kaluga regions. Alexander Herzen Junior Visiting Fellows are selected on the basis of an open competition and according to the criteria set out in the Call for Applications. All candidates that suit the formal criteria are eligible to take part in the competition.
deadline for applications: 31st March 2012, more details: here.

3. The European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) Fellowship Programme is an international researcher mobility programme offering 10-month residencies in one of the 14 participating Institutes: Berlin, Bologna, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest, Cambridge, Helsinki, Jerusalem, Lyons, Nantes, Paris, Uppsala, Vienna, Wassenaar. The Institutes for Advanced Study support the focused, self-directed work of outstanding researchers. The fellows benefit from the finest intellectual and research conditions and from the stimulating environment of a multi-disciplinary and international community of first-rate scholars.

For the 2013-2014 academic year, EURIAS offers 36 fellowships (19 junior and 17 senior positions).

deadline for applications: 7th June 2012; more details here.

To see the full offert and its conditions, please refer to Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen/ Institute for Human Sciences website.